Shade The Truth
by Pyrasaur
Summary: She usually allows him his solitude, but his grip was trembling earlier — and in mortal men, shrapnel does not remove itself. (Wonder Woman/Batman, unresolved emotional tension)


Diana doesn't typically intrude on his privacy. He's a proud man and he has his rituals, his wellsprings of strength. Batman held his own weight today, accepting her airlift with an arm thrown over her shoulders — but his grip trembled so. And Diana would be foolish not to mind the condition of her allies.

That is the near-to-whole truth she tells herself while heading to the Watchtower's infirmary.

She finds him sitting on the end of an infirmary bed, most of the lights doused so he and his equipment tray are spotlit. His night-dark cape is swept over one shoulder. The bat emblem is removed, and some of his armour and bracers and padding; he sits bare-chested with his blade-edge gaze on a mirror, one of two allowing him to see the tattered, bleeding place on his own shoulder blade.

"Batman?" She crosses the tiles.  
He doesn't look up. Just stays intent on his motions with the tweezers.  
"The hostages are all safe?" he gruffly asks.  
"Yes, Green Lantern is relocating the last of them now."  
He hums, flatly pleased. He uncurls his arm from around himself and has a flashing fragment held in the tweezers, a blood-wet piece of shrapnel. It clatters into a small metal pan to join five others. He is doing precise work — left-handed, behind his own back.  
"Thanks for the lift today," he says with just a little less growl. He pauses, and returns to the wound.  
"I'm here to assist," Diana says. "Speaking of which, would you like some help with that?"  
"It's nothing serious."  
"That's not what I asked."  
He gives her the beginning of a glare — maybe, maybe that's what he's doing under the white lenses but the unsettled shift of his mouth gives him away.  
"The wound won't heal if you don't clean it out completely," Diana supposes, "isn't that how it works?" She says it with more innocence than necessary. She can be persuasive, too.  
Silence. Batman glowers at the floor, his deadly mind considering. And he relents, "I could probably use a hand."

There is relief in the way he holds out the tweezers. It's a pittance of motion but it means Diana is trusted. Smiling, feeling the weight of a new gift, she takes the tool and rounds Batman's exposed back.  
"Use the sanitizer first."  
"The—?"  
She catches sight of the pump bottle and understands — dimly, anyway. Man's world is vicious and fragile, down to its microscopic creatures.  
"Hope you don't mind a little blood," he adds.  
"I think I'll manage," she says dryly, working the sanitizer gel over her hands until it vanishes — cool like a barest brush of ice.

The jesting atmosphere seems to dissipate with the gel. There is only the hum of equipment and the immediacy of this pool of light, as Diana poises the tweezers and considers Batman's wound. It looks ugly but is blessedly shallow. She isn't sure what she'd do if a wound were a real threat to his mortal life; the mechanical things in this infirmary don't yet make sense to her. Batman shifts, looking somewhere far more distant than this room.  
"I've got somebody in Gotham who usually looks after this sort of thing," he admits.  
_Someone who looks after me_, he means, but he'd never phrase it that way. So stubborn.  
"They must be skilled at what they do," Diana says. "It takes weeks to heal, doesn't it?"  
"Usually. I've got an experimental dermal regeneration salve that's yielding good results so far. I can't be seen with battle scars."  
In his alternate identity, he must have meant. Part of men's strange obsession with secrets. Diana regards the back of his head — with a grey, bitter sympathy washing over her — and first touches his wound.  
"Have you ever provided first aid to a mere mortal?" He says it without venom; his breathing is even.  
"I've bandaged a few wounds back in Themyscira, and splinted a broken leg ..." She takes sure grasp of a glass fragment, a wicked one like a snake's tooth. It resists her initial, careful tug; she frowns. "One of our enemies invoked a spell of withering strength. Many Amazon women were injured in battle before we could reverse it."  
In this safe room, Diana recalls the agonized sounds that broken-legged woman made. She doesn't relate them. She only pulls at the shrapnel lodged in this ally and it gives suddenly, wetly: he doesn't flinch.  
"Broken leg, huh," Batman asks. "Compound or simple fracture?"  
"Simple enough," she guesses. The snake-tooth fragment clatters loud into the pan. "The injury was all hidden within her. Once the withering spell was lifted, she healed before nightfall."  
"Then I don't suppose there were any stitches involved."  
"Stitches? You mean like these?" And she pauses her search to lay fingertips on him, lower on his back, away from the crusting blood. There are parallel black threads lodged there, binding a swollen line of healing flesh. It is genius or barbarism: Diana isn't sure which.

Batman is silent in that moment. Stone still. Breath bitten back. Maybe she's stepped too far, touching his skin like this. He's warm to the touch like any person but he's not ever meant to be vulnerable, not when he wears this knight's mantle. What challenges he rises to.

"This stitched one is from last week, right?" she asks to break the stalemate. "Landing on that jagged steel plate?"  
"You noticed."  
"I wouldn't be much of a warrior if I didn't notice."

Another pause. She takes back her audacious hand and refocuses on her work. One more glass shard yields to her. And one speck of glass, barely large enough to glitter, hides in a clotting corner. She regrets prying at the wound and drawing more fresh blood but that is a necessity.  
"That's all the foreign material," she finally reports.  
"Good. I can take it from here." From the equipment tray, he takes a curved needle and holds it aloft to thread it.  
A clever but brutal technique, she thinks again. "You can?"  
"It's fundamentally the same as sewing fabric."  
"_That's_ something I've never done."

She puts the tweezers down with the other tools. The click of it seems final, the room enormous around them again. And she lingers.

The needle is threaded but Batman hesitates, straight-backed, considering the floor. There's a thickness in the air like rain about to fall.  
"Thank you, Diana," he slowly says.  
Two gifts in the same day. She knows his birth name and holds it on her tongue — but it isn't a name he's truly given her to use yet. They both keep silent in the face of truth, this routine she is beginning to hate and yet relish.  
"You're welcome," she says, and means it.

Her steps echo as she leaves, as Batman repositions the mirrors. He has his wellsprings of strength, this fellow warrior, and Diana will push her luck farther in some day to come.

Actions 


End file.
